not dead yet

Last night I was hanging out with a bunch of writers and readers at Charis Books in Atlanta and we were talking about books and publishing and the industry and all the rest of it, like you do, and I ended up standing on one of my occasional soapboxes, namely, that publishing isn’t dead yet.

There’s a lot of yowling and howling from a lot of quarters about the death of print, the death of the book, how no one reads, how publishing is circling the drain and also the zombie apocalypse is coming and since no one outside the book business reads any more, only people in the book business still have brains, so as soon as the zombies get hungry the publishing industry will be dead anyway.

I really don’t think so. I do think that the ways people read are changing, and they’ve changed before but perhaps not quite so dramatically in such a short time since, well, probably since the time that printed material became economically accessible to a large chunk of the general European population, in the 18th century.

The paper book has had a long, wonderful life and I don’t think that life’s over.  What I do think is that it’s having to learn how to share space with other modes of text delivery, and that’s hard, especially when we are caught up in a culture that associates a lot of things with books as physical objects — things about class and education and wealth and cultural capital.

Certainly books have significance beyond the text on their pages.  But neither publishing or reading are limited to that one specific class of object any more, nor should they necessarily be.  In time, other means of delivering text to readers will evolve their own cultural significance and some of them may rival the paper book for status.  We’ll see.

But no, I don’t think publishing is dead, or dying, or even gravely ill.  I think it’s just learning new tricks.  It’s done it before.  It’ll do it again.  I suppose I take the long view partly because I’m an historian.  But I also take the long view because human beings love words, and love reading words, and that isn’t likely to die any time soon.